Can Shared Hosting Hurt Your Google Rankings? Does it Impact SEO?

[Jackomos]

Can shared hosting influence serp standings? I mean If I have my website on shared hosting there's a lot of other websites on the same IP and who knows how many of them are in link farms or PBNs...

Can someone spread some knowledge on this?

 

[Cash Builder]

Can shared hosting influence serp standings? I mean If I have my website on shared hosting there's a lot of other websites on the same IP and who knows how many of them are in link farms or PBNs...

Can someone spread some knowledge on this?

I don't know if there are any studies on this, but I've used shared hosting on my two previous sites and never had any problems ranking.

 

[darkzerothree]

Not from my experience.

You'd be demoting every site on shared hosts.

 

[Jackomos]

I don't know if there are any studies on this, but I've used shared hosting on my two previous sites and never had any problems ranking.

Well, I have a clean website with a few manual links on guest posts. The same server is hosting 156 websites.

I've been adding content and creating content silo to promote one money keyword (fairly easy I'd say) and after 6 months I'm in the same position (worse actually) when it started to rank at 55 position.

Not from my experience.

You'd be demoting every site on shared hosts.

Maybe serps aren't demoting, maybe they are sandboxing... Just like they are sandboxing me.

 

[CCarter]

I've been adding content and creating content silo to promote one money keyword (fairly easy I'd say) and after 6 months I'm in the same position (worse actually) when it started to rank at 55 position.

Perhaps it's your SEO strategy - 6 months of no movement is a tell sign something is off.

Regarding shared hosting - Google is very aware of shared hosting - most websites on the internet are on some sort of shared hosting. It only becomes a problem if your site speed is being effected - unless you are on a notorious bad IP address. What's your average site speed for your home page and your money page?

However it might be that you aren't moving up BECAUSE you are solely focusing on that money keyword yet have not done other optimization to get the related terms that you need to rank for your money keyword.

Example, if you want to rank for "Blue widget" you might need to also rank for "red widget", "blue-green widget", and "widget comparison".

Another example - if you want to rank for "iPhone cases", you'll need to rank for "iPhone 6S cases", "iPhone 6S Plus cases", "iPhone 7s cases", "iPhone 7s Plus cases", and now "iPhone 8 cases", and "iPhone X cases" - just to rank for "iPhone cases".

It doesn't matter if you want to rank for a lower volume keyword like only "iPhone 5c cases" - you'll need to rank for related terms - meaning getting backlinks and interlinking properly to rank for your low level keyword or your high level keyword. The old days of just ranking for the money keyword are over. Google has advanced a lot in the last 10 to 15 years.

To determine relevancy you should look at the Top 10 results for your money keyword and get the list of the URLs (not domains), but URLs ranking for that money keyword.

Now input the URL into SEMRush or another tool that will spit out the keywords which are ranking for each URL.

Now once you know what each of the top 10 pages are ranking for, look for commonalities - so if URL #1, URL #2, URL #3, and URL #5 also rank for "Pink iPhone 5c cases" - yet YOU DO NOT even mention that word on your website you can see why you are considered an outlier. Find the keywords that most of the top 10 URLs also rank for and use those keywords within your content AND attempt to rank for those keywords as well. This will show Google that YOU deserve to be in the same cluster as the top 10 URLs ranking for the money term.

Now that's a lot of work with spreadsheets and stuff, but when we figured out the relevancy angle at SERPWoo we created our keyword tool called Keyword Finder that does the pulling of the top 10 URLs for your seed, money, keyword and then pull the rankings for that URL and cluster them together for you. Screenshot:

^^ in that example it goes after "best keyword tool". You can see in the legend each URL that is ranking with a circled color.

You can then sort the column by "source", and see which keywords our page needs to also rank for - or at the very least include, since multiple top 10 sources also rank for those secondary/related terms while holding the top 10 positions for the seed keyword "best keyword tool".

Here I'll need to go after: "keywords search tool", "good keyword tool", "keyword lookup", "keyword analysis", and "keyword search volume" in order to also rank for "best keyword tool".

The key is understanding how Google thinks - it wants to understand what a page is about, you need the additional secondary/related keywords within your content - and rank for them in order for you to take over your money/seed keyword.

If getting and ranking for additional related keywords to your money keyword wasn't a part of your strategy I think you can now start to see why you haven't made any serious movement in the last 6 months.

 

[Jackomos]

Perhaps it's your SEO strategy - 6 months of no movement is a tell sign something is off.

Regarding shared hosting - Google is very aware of shared hosting - most websites on the internet are on some sort of shared hosting. It only becomes a problem if your site speed is being effected - unless you are on a notorious bad IP address. What's your average site speed for your home page and your money page?

However it might be that you aren't moving up BECAUSE you are solely focusing on that money keyword yet have not done other optimization to get the related terms that you need to rank for your money keyword.

Example, if you want to rank for "Blue widget" you might need to also rank for "red widget", "blue-green widget", and "widget comparison".

Another example - if you want to rank for "iPhone cases", you'll need to rank for "iPhone 6S cases", "iPhone 6S Plus cases", "iPhone 7s cases", "iPhone 7s Plus cases", and now "iPhone 8 cases", and "iPhone X cases" - just to rank for "iPhone cases".

It doesn't matter if you want to rank for a lower volume keyword like only "iPhone 5c cases" - you'll need to rank for related terms - meaning getting backlinks and interlinking properly to rank for your low level keyword or your high level keyword. The old days of just ranking for the money keyword are over. Google has advanced a lot in the last 10 to 15 years.

To determine relevancy you should look at the Top 10 results for your money keyword and get the list of the URLs (not domains), but URLs ranking for that money keyword.

Now input the URL into SEMRush or another tool that will spit out the keywords which are ranking for each URL.

Now once you know what each of the top 10 pages are ranking for, look for commonalities - so if URL #1, URL #2, URL #3, and URL #5 also rank for "Pink iPhone 5c cases" - yet YOU DO NOT even mention that word on your website you can see why you are considered an outlier. Find the keywords that most of the top 10 URLs also rank for and use those keywords within your content AND attempt to rank for those keywords as well. This will show Google that YOU deserve to be in the same cluster as the top 10 URLs ranking for the money term.

Now that's a lot of work with spreadsheets and stuff, but when we figured out the relevancy angle at SERPWoo we created our keyword tool called Keyword Finder that does the pulling of the top 10 URLs for your seed, money, keyword and then pull the rankings for that URL and cluster them together for you. Screenshot:

^^ in that example it goes after "best keyword tool". You can see in the legend each URL that is ranking with a circled color.

You can then sort the column by "source", and see which keywords our page needs to also rank for - or at the very least include, since multiple top 10 sources also rank for those secondary/related terms while holding the top 10 positions for the seed keyword "best keyword tool".

Here I'll need to go after: "keywords search tool", "good keyword tool", "keyword lookup", "keyword analysis", and "keyword search volume" in order to also rank for "best keyword tool".

The key is understanding how Google thinks - it wants to understand what a page is about, you need the additional secondary/related keywords within your content - and rank for them in order for you to take over your money/seed keyword.

If getting and ranking for additional related keywords to your money keyword wasn't a part of your strategy I think you can now start to see why you haven't made any serious movement in the last 6 months.

Thanks, great info here CCarter.
I am doing something similar with supporting content and interlinking it to my main article but with much less investigation. I'll re-investigate the top 10 results and remake my content accordingly. Then we'll see if that was the case.